Outside of EA, it normally means the main function of the organisation (the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO)
I was surprised by this claim, so I checked every (of the 3) non-EA orgs I’ve worked at. Not only is it not true that “the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO,” literally none of them even have a COO for the whole org.
To check whether my experiences were representative, I went through this list of the largest companies. It looks like of the 5 largest companies by market cap, 2 of them have COOs (Apple, Amazon). Microsoft doesn’t have a designated COO, but they had a Chief Human Resources Officer and a Chief Financial Officer, which in smaller orgs will probably be a COO job[1]. So maybe an appropriate prior is 50%? This is a very quick spotcheck however, would be interested in more representative data.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.
For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations: “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the company’s health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.”
For Amazon, I couldn’t find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.
I was surprised by this claim, so I checked every (of the 3) non-EA orgs I’ve worked at. Not only is it not true that “the COO normally has the highest number of people reporting to them after the CEO,” literally none of them even have a COO for the whole org.
To check whether my experiences were representative, I went through this list of the largest companies. It looks like of the 5 largest companies by market cap, 2 of them have COOs (Apple,
Amazon). Microsoft doesn’t have a designated COO, but they had a Chief Human Resources Officer and a Chief Financial Officer, which in smaller orgs will probably be a COO job[1]. So maybe an appropriate prior is 50%? This is a very quick spotcheck however, would be interested in more representative data.Notably, they didn’t have a CTO, which surprised me.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.
For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations: “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the company’s health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.”
For Amazon, I couldn’t find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.